Help is on the way!

In these last days of the presidential campaign, John Kerry has taken to wrapping up his speeches with the rousing catch-phrase "Help is on the way!" This choice of slogans suggests that Kerry is either completely out of touch with reality or drinking too deeply from the well of his own rhetoric and actually believing some of the silliness in his position papers.

Consider what exactly John Kerry is going to save us from.

Is it the perils of unemployment? Unlikely with historically low unemployment sitting at 5.4 percent, 1.4 points lower than the average for the last 30 years. Kerry talks about how Bush lost us 1.9 million jobs, but the truth is that while we may have lost that many jobs in the industrial sector we've gained substantially more than that in other areas and have an overall net gain in employment over the last 4 years.

Perhaps he plans to save us from the dangers of terrorism. That should be easy to do anyway, since the war in Iraq has already drawn most of the terrorists to that battle and resulted in no major terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11. Not sure what Kerry could to to improve on that situation. Perhaps pull us out of Iraq so the terrorists have more time and freedom to figure out ways to bring their fight to US soil.

Maybe Kerry wants to save us from a depressed economy. I know I'm suffering pretty hard with my stock portfolio up almost 30% overall in the past year and interest rates still remarkably low. The only weak point in the economy is the high gas prices and resulting inflation, and I can't begin to imagine how Kerry can fix that and neither can he judging from his utter lack of specific proposals to deal with the problem and his plans to cut back on domestic oil production.

I guess he could be planning to save us from the bloated deficit with his multi-trillion dollar national health insurance program. He might at least get some mileage there since big numbers scare people and most of them don't realize that the current deficit is relatively low in proportion to the Gross Domestic Product and that the GDP is growing at an extraordinary rate. Yes, Bush has spent a lot more than we'd like on all sorts of programs, but because of the rate at which the GDP is growing the proportional growth in tax revenues will eventually offset the growth in the deficit. This is the same phenomenon which erased Clinton's deficit spending with no effort on his part.

I know he wants to protect us from difficult decision making situations. The stress is just too much for us. He wants to make sure that our money continues to go to Social Security where it earns no meaningful return and insures us a pathetic living as paupers when we retire - assuming it even still exists at that point. We certainly can't be trusted to manage and invest even a portion of that money so that we've got something meaningful to fall back on in retirement.

But thank god that help is on the way. Kerry's bringing it with one government hand in our pockets and the other force feeding us what it thinks we need. Personally I'd much prefer that he leave me the hell alone and let me help myself. At least that way I know someone who has my actual interests at heart will be on the job.

Dave